We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • declined

    NRCan’s Magnetic declination calculator is pretty cool (if you need that sort of thing). It was doing something weird yesterday, though: if you searched for Listowel, ON (43° 43′ North, 80° 57′ West), you actually got the coordinates and declination for Sechelt, BC (49° 28.8′ North, 123° 45.6′ West). And if you in turn searched for Sechelt, you got Fernie, BC instead (49° 30′ North, 115° 3′ West). Hmm.

  • the analogue hole

    I have a bunch of Catherine’s old family recordings to digitise (do people still do that – sit around a tape recorder and make recordings?) and I had recorded one of Ken’s shows on minidisc, so I needed a relatively clean way to get analogue audio onto the computer.

    I ended up getting a Griffin iMic, a small USB audio input device. The sound quality is remarkably clean; here’s a sine wave recorded from CD to minidisc, then recorded on the iMic:

    tracks000.png

     

    The  iMic seems to work with all Mac audio software as an input device. The free Final Vinyl recording sofware is pretty, but a bit buggy and annoyingly, only works when the iMic is connected. I just use Audacity, and have done with it.

  • Jeremy = teh smrt!

    Jeremy Clarkson thought it would be a good idea to publish his bank details to show that the whole thing about identity theft was hooey. Not such a good idea.

  • across the universe, or eula à gogo

    In the Holiday Inn Express in St Louis again. Their clickwrap EULA for wireless access from Zerowire Networks is hilarious. The whole text is quoted after the cut, but the highlights include:

    • anything you transmit over the network (like your credit card details, your login for legopr0n.com, or this blog posting) belongs to the hotel, and “may be processed, used, reproduced, modified, adapted, translated, used to create derivative works, shared, published and distributed by HOTEL in its sole and absolute discretion in any media and manner irrevocably in perpetuity in any location throughout the universe”. So I’m sure the murals at the first Holiday Inn Express on Mars will be decorated with credit card info.
    • Riddled with typos and random copy-and-pasted sections, you nonetheless “waive any right to claim ambiguity or error in this Agreement!” [yep, the exclamation mark’s part of it too]
    • About half way into it, it starts representing Hilton Hotels, rather than Holiday Inn. I suspect Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V here.
    • Gives up-to-the-minute advice for setting cookie preferences for IE4, a browser that became obsolete in 1998.

    As it’s such a mishmash, I think I’m pretty much exempted, ‘cos I crossed my fingers behind my back before clicking “Accept” …
    (more…)

  • wiggly

    Can I just say that the road from Busch to Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the most gratuitously wiggly route I’ve ever driven?

    Our route down from Kansas City was longer than I thought; place not blind trust in GPS routing, especially when you’re close to the edge of the maps you’ve uploaded. Due to one wrong turn on my part, we ended up in Overland Park, KS — rather than being on Hwy 71 all the way south. In future, I shall upload all the maps I need, plus all the states/provinces surrounding, so you don’t get that terra incognita/here be dragons feeling of falling off the edge of your wee scrolly map.

  • how irritating

    OpenOffice doesn’t import the EOMONTH() function from Excel spreadsheets, but knows what it is when you type it manually. C’mon, people, get hep!

  • very poor

    It just took my work computer more than 5 minutes to create a new folder on the desktop. How am I supposed to get my work done?

  • indigo’s most overpriced yet

    I saw the most obscene markup in indigo this evening: the Linux Format OpenOffice.org special edition was priced at a hefty $34.95. This costs £10 in the UK.

    The thing is, UK prices are quoted tax-inclusive. The ten quid you see is the ten quid you pay. Not so in Canada. In the most boneheaded move ever, our prices don’t include tax, so that $34.95 really costs you $39.84 (in Ontario, at least).

    According to Google, £10 is $20.53. Indigo’s markup is almost 100%

  • so-called wizard

    Windows has just spent the last 15 minutes searching for a driver for my Garmin GPS. Y’know, the one I use with the computer a lot. It’s claiming it’s new hardware, but in the words of Syd, “I’ve had it for months”. Oh Windows, you really are very stupid. In fact, you are a silly wizard.

  • it doesn’t get any better than 3D rainbow-effect Comic Sans

    billions of years of evolution culminates in this

    No, there is better. Much better than this.

  • whoa, I won something!

    My strategy of dropping off my business card at every trade show booth that promises quality swag paid off. I just received an MP3 player from Genivar – thanks, folks!

    It’s a weird little unit. Looks almost identical to a nano, but is your plain-vanilla USB mass storage device – something that Apple could learn from, but they’re in the business of selling players tied to iTunes. It also has a standard USB connector for days transfer and charging – Apple and iRiver please note.

    It seems it’s an S1 type player, so can play videos in its own weird format. It also has a voice recorder, which again records in its own special format (likely some hacked version of GSM).

    It will be fun playing with it.

    Update: Looks like it’s an ATJ-2135 Actions Semiconductor player of some kind. It can record in ADPCM wav (which sox can convert), or its own weird ACT format (which can be converted using this Windows-only program).

  • easily amazed

    I know the technology is not that nifty, but I amused and amazed myself by sshing into the home server whilst on the Via train somewhere between Smith’s Falls and Ottawa.

  • Koolu: low-energy computers

    Dave sent me this. It’s kind of what I’ve been trying to do with Mini-ITX for a while, but at a sensible price. I suspect the fanless Geode processor is slightly low in grunt, but it’ll do the job: Koolu.

  • not-so-smart meter

    We got our smart meter installed today. Unfortunately, Catherine didn’t quite understand why there was a knock on the door, then her computer went beeeeyyooooww … then all our clocks caught the <blink> tag.

    While I like smart meters, this one isn’t quite as smart as it could be. To me, a smart meter needs to have a big display of your current demand, and needs to be inscribed with a suitable message like “Quit using so much juice, you cretin!” It also needs to hook into local time-of-use pricing, which me being  green and a Bullfrog customer and all, I don’t get to take part in. Boo.

    But what could have really gone sideways was my own desktop, which was quietly chugging away installing Ubuntu 7.10. Since I started using Linux in 1995, I don’t think I’ve ever had a system upgrade go totally smoothly. This time, though, I was lucky – the system must have fully initialised before we lost power.

    I can’t honestly say I see any difference between Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon; they both are fairly pretty, and just work.

  • auto-CC’ing someone with Outlook

    If you’ve ever forgotten to cc someone on an e-mail and you’re forced to use Outlook, this could be useful.
    Real example: R is an external contractor. T manages R’s company’s account for us, but isn’t involved in all communications with R. By setting up an outgoing mail filter, I can ensure that all mail I send to R is copied to T.
    The Rules wizard lives in the Tools menu, and the option called (I think) “Rules & Filters”:

    setting up a mail send rule in Outlook

    This particular example is made more complex by R’s having two e-mail addresses. Multiple addresses in the distribution list become a logical-or, so it works out. I’m not sure if I strictly needed the exclusion clause to only cc T if T is not explicitly in the To: or Cc: fields, but it works.

    Outgoing filters only work if Outlook is running, so won’t work if you are not logged in.

  • Stupid HP!

    My printer required a software update to change a reference to an HP web page that had moved:

    stupid_hp.PNG

    Stupid HP! Don’t you know that cool URIs don’t change?

  • serene detachment

    The office network has been down all day. I don’t keep paper copies of anything. Therefore, today has been quite quiet, detached from everything.

  • largo

    I just installed IBM® Lotus® Symphonyâ„¢. I don’t have the pokiest PC on the block, but in order to make it run at any speed at all, you’d need to have a bit of grunt in your PC. My VIA SP13000 box takes a couple of minutes just to bring up the main window.

    To be fair, OpenOffice isn’t the fastest starter either; none of them have large bits of themselves running in the Windows system code, unlike MS OfficeThey both work, and are free – and Symphony looks a deal prettier than OpenOffice. As there’s no Mac version of Symphony yet, I’m unlikely to switch just yet.

  • unexpected beauty

    zv.png

  • how to get craigslist searches by e-mail

    1. Go to <http://toronto.craigslist.org/>
    2. Enter your search term in the “search craigslist” box
    3. When you get the results, scroll to the bottom. There is a final paragraph that says “RSS (?)”. Copy the RSS link address (move the mouse pointer over the RSS link, right click, and select “Copy Shortcut”)
    4. Open an new window (Ctrl-N in IE)
    5. In the new window, go to <http://www.rssfwd.com/>
    6. Paste the link you copied from craigslist into the “Enter a feed to subscribe” box – the link should look something like <http://toronto.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=this%20that&format=rss>, and hit Subscribe
    7. Enter your e-mail address on the next page – before you hit Subscribe again, you might want to check the preview of the feed that’s shown on the page to see that it’s finding what you want. You probably want to keep the e-mail type as “Normal – Send each update as individual e-mails”, and uncheck the “Share at Popular Feeds” page
    8. You will get a confirmation e-mail – hit the confirm link, which will take you to a page you probably don’t need to understand
    9. rssfwd should mail you within a couple of hours of new items being posted. Each e-mail should have unsubscription information